Topic for the Year 2011–2012:
“Memory and Forgetting”

In recent years, scholars have become increasingly attentive to the creation
and management of memory in ancient Jewish and Christian communities. This
interest has gone beyond longstanding discussions about the oral and textual
transmission of scriptures to consider the mechanics of the ritual
memorialization of events and liturgical performance of the past, as well as
the place of art, architecture, pilgrimage, and pedagogy in mediating and
managing communal memories. How were memory and forgetting used to construct
and maintain Jewish and Christian identities and boundaries? How do bodily
movements and gestures serve to make and keep memories, including those
about the proper shape and performance of gender? Furthermore, what role is
played by the spaces and places in which bodies move and such memories are
articulated? If questions of this sort remind us of the potency and
malleability of memory, they also push us to ask about selectivity: Who and
what has not been remembered? As such, the topic of memory and forgetting
also addresses us as historians. Whose memories are we preserving and/or
recovering, and whose are we forgetting? Why, and to what effect? How do
technologies of memory-making shape the encounter and image of the past both
within ancient religions, and for the scholars who study them? For example,
texts may easily be identified as repositories of memory, but how does the
mode and material of a text's transmission affect its memory-function as
well as our access to it? This year's PSCO welcomes a conversation about
these related issues concerning memory and forgetting and their place in the
history and historiography of early Judaism and Christianity.